Recent developments in the art of manufacturing has brought significant reduction in cost and form factor of mobile consumer devices—tablet, blue tooth headset, net book, net TV etc. As a result, there is an explosive growth in consumption of these consumer devices. Besides communication applications such as voice and video telephony, voice driven machine applications are becoming increasing popular as well. Voice based machine applications include voice driven automated attendants, command recognition, speech recognition, voice based search engine, networked games and such. Video conferencing and other display oriented applications require the user to watch the screen from a hand-held distance. In the hand-held mode, the signal to noise ratio of the desired voice signal at the microphone is severely degraded, both due to the exposure to ambient noise and the exposure to loud acoustic echo feedback from the loudspeakers in close proximity. This is further exacerbated by the fact that voice driven applications and improved voice communications require wide band voice.
Binaural headsets, both wired and wireless have been increasing along with the explosive growth of mobile consumer devices. However, the noise environments in which the headsets are used are becoming ever more challenging, especially in the presence of ambient noise in the environment of the listener.
It is within this context that the embodiments arise.